Bodine: The Hatchery on This Ground, at Animal Size

1983 to the present; the Indiana DNR's own accounts

The works stand in the parks file — the 1981 lease of 10.9 acres from American Electric Power, the Richard Clay Bodine State Fish Hatchery completed in 1983 on Mishawaka's east side. What stands here is the animal record of the place: the fish it raises, the fish it takes from the lake, and the fish it puts back into this river. The hatchery's standing charge, on the DNR's account, is the production of coho salmon and two strains of steelhead — the Skamania and the Little Manistee, or Michigan, strain — for the St. Joseph River, where Indiana's trout and salmon stocking began in 1984. Its broodstock program is the most animal-sized fact in this section: the Skamania strain is kept by the hatchery itself. Adult steelhead are harvested from Trail Creek and Lake Michigan from late June through mid-to-late August, with the goal of filling the broodstock tanks with 700 fish — 450 females and 250 males. Eggs are taken once a week from early January through mid-February, into incubators of eighteen eight-tray stacks loaded at 10,000 to 14,000 eggs a tray; the fry move to indoor raceways and then to outdoor circular ponds on a recirculating system that at peak capacity moves about 3,750 gallons a minute. And about a month after the last eggs are taken, the surviving broodstock adults — the lake-run steelhead that spawned in the tanks — are released into the St. Joseph River at Mishawaka: the hatchery's oldest fish go home to the river below the dams every spring. The production record runs in the DNR's release figures. In the spring of 2021 the state's hatcheries stocked more than 589,100 trout and salmon into Lake Michigan and its tributaries, the St. Joseph River among the named receiving waters — 225,776 Skamania steelhead yearlings and 195,915 Chinook fingerlings among them; that fall, Bodine itself released 29,457 coho salmon fingerlings of about 7.2 inches into Trail Creek. The spring of 2022 added 194,836 Skamania yearlings and 224,753 Chinook fingerlings to the same system of waters, the river again among them. The program's present tense, verified in the fall of 2026, is adjustment rather than growth: in October 2026 the DNR announced that, under a Lake Michigan Committee agreement to rebalance predators and prey, the 2027 Chinook stocking would be cut from 275,000 to 200,000 — and stated that the change "won't impact stocking efforts on the St. Joseph River," while freeing hatchery space to hold winter-run steelhead longer and raise an additional 20,000 fall-fingerling Skamania. The river's built fishery, forty years on, is still being tuned from the hatchery on this city's east side.

Principal sources

1. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, "Bodine State Fish Hatchery," in.gov — the broodstock program, egg take, incubators, raceways, and the release of spent adults into the St. Joseph River; read November 2026.
2. Indiana DNR releases via events.in.gov — the spring 2021 stockings (589,100 fish; the St. Joseph River among the waters); the fall 2021 coho stocking (Bodine's 29,457 fingerlings into Trail Creek); the spring 2022 stockings.
3. Michiana Outdoors News, 22 October 2026 — the 2027 Chinook reduction and the St. Joseph River's exemption from it, per the DNR's Lake Michigan fisheries biologist.